Don’t look at the photos and video if you’re a big animal lover, it’s “a little” hard to take in…

This “bay of blood” set somewhere in the Faroe Islands is where hundreds, sometimes thousands of pilot whales are literally butchered alive by hungry locals. The hunt known as Grindadrap is centuries old and it hasn’t changed much since then, except for the power-boats, radios and echo-sounders which make life a lot easier for the butchers. They round the poor whales into the shore with the power-boats and when they get really close, the locals plunge into the waves and start hooking them to death in a horrific manner. Then they drag the carcasses to shore and start skinning them and splitting the meat and blubber between all the islands’ inhabitants.

The Faroes economy relies only on economic fishing, but that doesn’t give them the right to slaughter 544 Atlantic white sided dolphins in a single day, like they did in 1988.

recently, studies have shown that the meat and blubber of pilot whales contain high amounts of mercury, PCBs, DDT and dieldrin. For what they do every year these animals deserve to get much more than mercury poisoning.

Photo: Erik Christensen/Wikipedia